Database demo: Images, history, culture of the 19th century at your fingertips

October 9, 2012

Just in time for those mid-term research projects, VCU librarians will give a show-and-tell of two important VCU Libraries databases. The University community is invited to drop by James Branch Cabell Library Oct. 17, 11 a.m. to 1 p.m.

Slavery and Anti-Slavery: A Transnational Archive, a significant collection of digital resources about slavery and abolition, traces the history and ongoing cultural impact of slavery. It provides access to thousands of full-text primary source documents and archival records. The online collection includes a small group of images, including the woodcut shown at right of Underground Railroad leader and abolitionist Harriet Tubman.Nineteenth Century Collections Online, according to its web site, is a new multi-year global digitization and publishing program focusing on primary source collections "of the first great age of industrialization and technological innovation. ... It was an age of political revolution and reform, nationalism and nation building, the expansion of empire and colonialism, growing literacy and education, and the flowering of culture both popular and high. It was an age that witnessed the development of the power-driven printing press and the massive explosion of written material that dwarfs the output of the centuries that preceded it."